Teaching the Structure of a Discipline

In this TED Talk (courtesy of @mdlev), Benjamin Zander describes and demonstrates the “transformative power of classical music.” David Perkins would be proud! Without explicitly saying so, Zander revels in one of Perkins’ favorite educational principles: that teaching should reveal the structure of the discipline to students. Zander finds in classical music the power to elicit human emotion through chords and melodies and argues that this is what makes classical music relevant to important to all. In this brief talk, Zander hones in on a “big idea” in the discipline, one of the principles on which classical music rests, which should be taught in any course on classical music!